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Page 38
What is the religious law, then? It is the law of humility. And what
is the religious consciousness? The sense of man's difference from
nature and from God. The sense of his difference from himself within
himself and the longing for an inner harmony which shall unite him
with himself and with the beauty and the spirit without. So what
is the religious passion? Is it to exalt human nature? It would
be more true to say it is to lose it. What is the end for us? Not
identification with nature and the natural self, but pursuit of the
other than nature, the more than natural self. Our humility is not
like that of Uriah Heep, a mean opinion of ourselves in comparison
with other men. It is the profound consciousness of the weakness and
the nothingness of our kind, and of the poor ends human nature sets
its heart upon, in comparison with that Other One above and beyond and
without us, to whom we are kin, from whom we are different, to whom we
aspire, to reach whom we know not how.
This, then, is what we mean when we turn back from the language of
experience to the vocabulary of philosophy and theology and talk about
the absolute values of religion. We mean by "absolute values" that
behind the multifarious and ever changing nature, is a single and a
steadfast cause--a great rock in a weary land. We have lost the old
absolute philosophies and dogmatic theologies and that is good and
right, for they were outworn. But we are never going to lose the
central experience that produced them, and our task is to find a
new philosophy to express these inner things for which the words
"supernatural," "absolute," are no longer intelligible. For we still
know that behind man's partial and relative knowledge, feeling,
willing, is an utter knowledge, a perfect feeling, a serene and
unswerving will; that beneath man's moral anarchy there is moral
sovereignty; that behind his helplessness there is abundant power
to save. Perhaps this Other is always changing, but, if so, it is a
Oneness which is changing. In short, the thing that is characteristic
of religion is that it dwells, not on man's likenesses, but on his
awful differences from nature and from God; sees him not as little
counterparts of deity, but as broken fragments only to be made whole
within the perfect life. It sees relativity as the law of our being,
yes, but relativity, not of the sort that excludes, but is included
in, a higher absolute, even as the planet swings in infinite space.
The trouble with much preaching is that it lacks the essentially
religious insight; in dwelling on man's identities it confuses or
drugs, not clarifies and purges, the spirit. Thus, it obscures the
gulf. Sometimes it evades it, or bridges it by minimizing it, and
genuinely religious people, and those who want to be religious, and
those who might be, know that such preaching is not real and that it
does not move them and, worst of all, the hungry sheep look up and
are not fed. For in such preaching there is no call to humility, no
plea for grace, no sense that the achievement of self-unity is as
much a rescue as it is a reformation. But this sense of the need of
salvation is integral to religion; this is where it has parted company
with humanism. Humanism makes no organic relations between man and
the Eternal. It is as though it thought these would take care of
themselves! In the place of grace it puts pride; pride of caste, of
family, of character, of intellect. But high self-discipline and
pride in the human spirit are not the deepest or the highest notes man
strikes. The cry, not of pride in self, but for fellowship with the
Infinite, is the superlative expression of man. Augustine sounded the
highest note of feeling when he wrote, "O God, Thou hast made us for
Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." The
words of the Lord Jesus gave the clearest insight of the human mind
when He said, "And when he came to himself, he said, I will arise and
go to my Father."
CHAPTER FIVE
GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE
I hope the concluding paragraphs of the last chapter brought us back
into the atmosphere of religion, into that sort of mood in which the
reality of the struggle for character, the craving of the human spirit
to give and to receive compassion, the cry of the lonely soul for the
love of God, were made manifest. These are the real goods of life to
religious natures; they need this meat which the world knoweth not of;
there is a continuing resolve in them to say, "Good-by, proud world,
I'm going home!" The genuinely religious man must, and should indeed,
live in this world, but he cannot live of it.
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